PowerUp Heroes Review - New Game Network

The latest Xbox exclusive title to use the Kinect technology, PowerUp Heroes from Ubisoft, is a bit of a mixed bag. Unlike all of the similarly designed titles before it, like Kinect Sports, PowerUp Heroes tries to take the gameplay to a more serious, competitive setting but ultimately ends up suffering because of the underlying technology. Earning and using superpowers with your Xbox Avatars is fun, but it’s limited entertainment with a host of control issues.

The premise of the game is to take your Xbox Avatar and transform them into a superhero. During the game’s relatively short campaign, you take on the invading alien forces of Malignance, the main villain. Most of your enemies are robots rather than humans, thus disposing of them presents little moral consequence for the younger target audience. Defeating enemies earns experience as well as occasionally a new power unlock. A level up system is also present, but it doesn’t seem to have any direct impact on the gameplay. You can go back and repeat the campaign for new unlocks and bonuses, with enemies getting some strength upgrades but using the same tactics as before, thus presenting limited replay value.

Once your Avatar dawns the superhero suit, there are a number of basic powers at your disposal, such as the ability to dash or use a basic fireball. Featuring around 20 super powers and suits to be collected, the game gradually allows the player to gain new abilities and use them in future battles. The powers are usually powerful but fairly cliche, allowing players to raise the dead, spew lava, or control their enemies with mental powers. Suits are similarly designed to match their special abilities.

It all works in theory, but with Kinect, things don’t often go very smoothly. Rather than employing one to one motion capture, the game instead relies on icons which tells players what to do – and then using the resulting pre-animated sequences in the game. If prompts are followed correctly, players can execute attacks and even combos on their enemies with hand gestures, as well as dodge and run forward by body and leg movements. None of the moves are complex and the attack powers are limited, which often makes the combat feel a bit stale.

However, with some awkard Kinect tracking, what works for a dancing game such as Just Dance 3 doesn’t quite work with PowerUp Heroes. Kinect failing to recognize your gestures (which happens too often) leaves your Avatar open to attack, and with no option to block, that’s a bad situation. Enemy attacks can be countered with your own moves, but again the motion tracking on Kinect proves time and again to be the major cause of frustration. While other casual titles mostly provide the player with enough leeway in motion tracking, as an action game, PowerUp Heroes often demands too much accuracy from the Kinect tracking to really work.

If single player isn’t for you, there are a couple of online modes included. Players can participate in local versus, where the Kinect tracking problems are at least less noticeable, replaced instead in favor of the random arm flailing with another human. If you have a certain desire to crush the fantasies of 10 year olds, you can also go online to play against other Avatars. There are online leaderboards too, but they won’t likely become overly competitive.

The presentation is often poor, with low quality visuals and very basic environments. Low resolution textures and minimal, cheesy voice acting is about all that makes up PowerUp Heroes. A lot of the effects look well enough, and at least are presented in such a way as not to obscure the on-screen action or the UI prompts. Menu navigation takes an inspiration from Just Dance 3, and thus is easy and intuitive to use.

PowerUp Heroes, released so close to the similarly engineered but ultimately superior Kinect title, Ubisoft’s own Just Dance 3, is simply a poor package in comparison. The idea behind the game is decent enough, but the game is fairly short, largely unimaginative in its super powers, and lacks any real replay value. Often dated visuals and minimal voice acting round up what is an unimpressive offering for a retail, albeit lower priced, release. By far, the biggest problem is due to the underlying Kinect technology, which is simply unable to provide the accuracy of input from the players that the game demands. With limited content, PowerUp Heroes is a largely barebones experience that would have been much better off as a downloadable title, after some gameplay polishing and adjustments to compensate for Kinect’s inherent annoyances.